it is true to say that Socialists
are especially engaged in strengthening and renewing the State; and
they are not especially engaged in strengthening and renewing the
Family. They are not doing anything to define the functions of
father, mother and child, as such--they have no firm instinctive
sense of one thing being in its nature private and another public."

It is precisely this kind of root-thinking that the book does. In the
free family there will be a division of the two sides of life,
between the man and the woman. The man must be, to a certain extent,
a specialist; he must do one thing well enough to earn the daily
bread. The woman is the universalist; she must do a hundred things
for the safeguarding and development of the home. The modern fad of
talking of the narrowness of domesticity especially provoked
Chesterton. "I cannot," he said

with the utmost energy of imagination conceive what they mean. When
domesticity, for instance, is called drudgery, all the difficulty
arises from a double meaning in the word. If drudgery only means
dreadfully hard work, I admit the woman drudges in the home, as a man
might drudge at the Cathedral of Amiens or drudge behind a gun at
Trafalgar. But if it means that the hard work is more heavy because
it is trifling, colourless and of small import to the soul, then as I
say, I give it up; I do not know what the words mean. To be Queen
Elizabeth within a definite area, deciding sales, banquets, labours
and holidays; to be Whiteley within a certain area, providing toys,
boots, sheets, cakes and books; to be Aristotle within a certain
area, teaching morals, manners, theology, and hygiene; I can
understand how this might exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how
it could narrow it. How can it be a large career to tell other
people's children about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell
one's own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the
same thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone? No; a
woman's function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not
because it is minute. I will pity Mrs. Jones for the hugeness of her
task; I will never pity her for its smallness.*

[* _What's Wrong With the World_, chapter 3, "The Emancipation of
Domesticity."]

While he was writing these pages and after their appearance in print,
G.K. was constantly asked to debate the question of Women's Su